Nevermore
by squigglysquid
Summary: On a dark, lonely night on Omega, Garrus Vakarian is haunted by a love lost and never forgotten. -Part of the Parable Series.


Omega was in a perpetual state of night, always shrouded in the dark shadows where monsters of the corporeal kind lay in wait to prey on the weak. What these creatures don't know is that there is an equally dangerous predator that hunts on this dirty, corrupted station.

How these monsters would laugh when they realize the dreaded Archangel is haunted by a hunter no more tangible than the recycled air that flows around them.

Garrus sits in the small, closet-sized apartment he has taken to squatting in, taking apart his weapons to occupy his tumultuous thoughts of the face of a loss that refuses to be forgotten. Oh, how the beautiful woman of his memories would shutter at the hull of a man he has become, surviving off hope for death's embrace.

The sound of heeled footsteps outside the room alerts him to a presence and he draws his already assembled pistol. Moving slowly to the inactive door, half fallen from its hinges, he glances out into the void of the hall lit only by what outside illumination shines in the gaps of boarded windows. Instead of the armed mercenaries come to drag him out to kill as Garrus suspects, he finds nothing. Not a single mote of dust flutters through the beams of light from a disturbance.

Frowning, he steps out into the hall, gun lowered at his side, and closes his eyes to listen. A unexpected scent wafts up to his nose, sour on his tongue with the once sweet memories it brings of a love gone rotten. As his eyes open to see if the owner of such a smell still exists and finds nothing. The scent of her is gone. "Jane?"

He knows there will be no answer. No such one will ever be uttered by a voice he holds so dear - from a love with whom he so regretfully wasted his time. He keens softly in loss and that long-ago forgotten heart within his chest stirs in agony before stilling once more. His idle hands tremble as the cold darkness threatens to engulf him and send him tumbling into the pain of memories, but he fights the urge to collapse and returns to his dreary dwelling.

He freezes at the same tapping of footsteps now within the abandoned apartment, but no source can be found in sight, no form moving within the cramped space.

Growling in frustration at some sort of jest being played by another, Garrus storms to the boarded up window through which stray streaks of light enter and looks out. Surely, the only souls to have found him would be of a dangerous sort, not those who find pleasure in tormenting a broken soul for sport. Whoever must be making these sounds of footsteps should be close enough to see even without full visual through the barricaded window, but when he scans the trash filled alley a level below his current position, he sees nothing. He is about to return to his work when he hears those taunting steps at his back and spins, raising his weapon to a sight that turns his blood to ice and vocals into a flurry of vocals ridden with pained emotion.

There before him stands a human woman in a stately gown, elegant and the color of black that absorbs all light that fell upon it. With a high, buttoned collar, the dress covers the woman's arms with sleeves of billowed shoulders that become fitted and end where gloves of black lacy conceal her hands. Garrus' eyes travel up the centered buttons of the fitted torso until they stop at the veiled face, a black rose circled in feathers securing the obscuring fabric that covers all but the barest hint of pale lips and porcelain chin.

Even without seeing her eyes, he knows, _knows,_ who stands before him, but his soul cannot stand the misery such hope would bring. _She is dead. Gone_.

"Are… are you…" He cannot force himself to give voice to an impossibility, but 'she' seems to understand.

Without so much as a twitch of emotion on her lips, the figure that wears a false face speaks in a voice of bittersweet poison. "Nevermore."

Confusion strikes him and Garrus rumbles with it as he steps closer to the cold visage of his dead mate. _She isn't real. I must be going insane… Wouldn't surprise me in the least_. "You aren't real," he says, soon frowning and dropping his head, closing his eyes against the pain of memories fighting to drown him again. "You aren't Jane."

"Nevermore."

He growls in irritation. _This… whatever she is, shouldn't be here._ Looking into the veil that hides the emeralds of her eyes, he demands. "Who are you? _What_ are you?" She does not move. "Tell me, dammit!"

"Nevermore."

Taking a deep breath to calm himself, he tries again. Perhaps this is more than his mind playing torturous games. "Is… Is there an afterlife? Will I ever be reunited with Jane?" He hesitantly reaches out to her, to touch even if she is only an imagining. Yet, as soon as his fingers close on her form, she is gone before his eyes that widen as his harmonics crack out in a voiceless cry.

She is gone. Just as quickly and mysteriously as she had come.

That is until he hears. "Nevermore."

Spinning, rage building with his torment, he snarls at the sight of her once more, standing before the window with light silhouetting her form. "What the hell are you!" he shouts, desperate and demanding, and storms towards her.

His feet catch on the crate of belongings to a past life filled of happiness and his lost wife and he crashes to the ground, tangled at the _thing's_ feet that cruelly taunts him. He cannot hold it within any longer, the struggle to remain distant and guarded now that her image stands before him too difficult, and begins to sob as best a turian can when she says once more, "Nevermore."


End file.
